Climate change
Mail-strom

Nov 26th 2009
From *The Economist* print edition
Leaked e-mails do not show climate scientists at their best
Illustration by Claudio Munoz

IS GLOBAL warming a trick? That is what some saw in a huge batch of e-mails
and documents taken from the servers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at
the University of East Anglia, in England, and put up anonymously on the
web. The result has been a field day for those sceptical of the idea of
man-made climate change, who have combed through them, pouncing and
pronouncing on snippets that seem to show scientific malfeasance.

The CRU specialises in studies of climates past. For parts of the past where
there were no thermometers to consult, such studies use proxy data, such as
tree rings. Reconstructions based on these tend to show that the planet’s
temperature has risen over the 20th century to heights unprecedented for
centuries and perhaps millennia. They are far from the only evidence for
believing in climate change as a man-made problem, but they are important,
and the sharp uptick they show has taken on iconic value. A tree-ring
reconstruction known as the “hockey stick”, which shows unprecedented
20th-century warming, has been a particular target of criticism by sceptics.
It was published in 1998 by Michael Mann (then at Yale, now at Pennsylvania
State University) and his colleagues, and featured prominently in the 2001
report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Hence the eagerness with which bloggers fell on one of the stolen e-mails,
sent in 1999 by Phil Jones, the CRU’s director: “I’ve just completed Mike’s
*Nature* trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20
years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the sceptics. But Dr Jones
has clarified that “The word trick was used here colloquially as in a clever
thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything
untoward.” The “hiding” concerned the decision to leave out a set of
tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local temperature changes.
That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and unexplained, but
eliminating it is not sinister.
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Another e-mail seen as shocking was from Kevin Trenberth of America’s
National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado: “Where the heck is
global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken
records the past two days for the coldest days on record.” But to take this
as evidence that Dr Trenberth questions global warming seems foolish. He
does not mean that a comparative lack of warming over the past decade shows
greenhouse warming has stopped. He knows that the climate has natural ups
and downs imposed on such trends, and that cold snaps happen. He is
expressing frustration that the monitoring needed to understand how these
variations work is not as good as it could be.

There is nothing in the e-mails so far to suggest that the authors do not
believe in man-made global warming and are making the whole thing up, as
some have been claiming. A more serious concern is that they believe in
global warming too much, and that their commitment to the cause leads them
to tolerate poor scientific practice, to close themselves off from
criticism, and to deny reasonable requests for data.
More heat than light

Some e-mails suggest the criticisms made by sceptics outside academic
climate science may have had more support within it than might be expected.
Comments on the tree-ring section of the IPCC’s latest report by John
Mitchell, director of climate science at Britain’s Met Office, raise issues
very like those highlighted by perhaps the most prominent critic of the
hockey stick, Steve McIntyre, who runs a blog called Climate Audit. An
e-mail apparently from Dr Mann refers to an aspect of some statistical
testing he did not want discussed widely as “dirty laundry”. Those worried
that undue weight is being put on data from the tree rings of a dozen
larches on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia, a topic that exercises Mr
McIntyre, will be interested to see that some climate scientists shared some
of their worries.

None of this is evidence of fraud. Looked at broadly, the e-mails seem to
show a pretty workaday picture of scientists, with frustrations and
sloppinesses, disagreements, opponents badmouthed, and cultural differences
bridged (for example, explaining to an American colleague not just why a
particular person is a prat, but what a prat is in the first place). Some of
the e-mails may, looked at in a context not currently available (those
posted were a selection), add weight to previous criticisms by Mr McIntyre
and others. But that, in itself, is not dramatic. Many of these issues were
aired in the most recent IPCC report, though not particularly thoroughly.
And the idea of anthropogenic climate change rests on a great deal more than
just tree-ring records, useful as they are for providing context to the
current warming.

A spate of recent claims of global cooling, for example, rely on comparing
1998, the second-hottest year in the modern record (going to 1880), with
2008, which was relatively cooler. Yet, according to the Goddard Institute
for Space Studies, a part of NASA, America’s space agency, 2008 was the
ninth-hottest year on record. 2009 is shaping up to be the sixth-hottest.
All of the ten hottest years recorded have come since 1997. And retreating
Arctic sea ice provides even more visible data to support conclusions of
warming.

More worrying than anything revealed about the scientific and other views of
the people involved is the sense that legitimate attempts at ensuring
transparency are being thwarted. Perhaps the most damaging exchange follows
a request made by Dave Holland, a British sceptic, to see CRU e-mails under
Britain’s Freedom of Information Act. (The CRU is publicly funded, and
therefore subject to the act.) Caspar Amman, one of Dr Trenberth’s
colleagues at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, wrote of the
request: “Oh MAN! When will this crap ever end??” Then Dr Jones wrote to Dr
Mann: “Mike, can you delete any e-mails you may have with Keith [Briffa] re
AR4? Keith will do likewise.”“AR4” refers to one of the IPCC’s reports. Dr
Mann says he never deleted any e-mails. Gavin Schmidt, a scientist at NASA
and the keeper of realclimate.org, an anti-sceptic blog, wrote that that
e-mail was very ill-advised. Dr Jones did not answer a request for comment.

Dr Mann rebuts allegations of data-hoarding. Ten-year-old data protocols did
not require keeping every scrap of data and calculation. Referring to his
hockey-stick paper, he says: “If we knew then the type of scrutiny that
would be applied to this work, we’d have made every scrap of data
available.” Now, he says, climate scientists release not only all their data
but also the proprietary algorithms they write to crunch the data. Not that
he thinks it will help: “They’re not looking to reproduce your analysis, in
many cases. They’re looking to badger, and to make unpleasant for us what we
love doing as scientists. It’s obvious to other graduate students and
post-docs rising up: if you choose to do this, this is what you will be
subject to.”

He should not expect matters to improve any time soon. In the wake of
“climategate”, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank
in Washington, DC, announced that it intended to sue NASA for not providing
climate data and other materials requested under America’s Freedom of
Information Act.

Many who accept that mankind is changing the climate disagree on how much
and how quickly things will change—projections into the future rely on
models whose feedback loops are constantly being refined, and which are the
source of much debate. Other observers have written that the focus on carbon
dioxide above all else has been misplaced, since quick wins are available in
other areas like cutting methane emissions or black carbon soot.

Sadly, discussing these things rationally in public is hard. As Judith
Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, observes,
attacks on climate scientists, sometimes paid for by carbon-emitting
industries when global warming first became a public issue, have made many
researchers in the field nervous and defensive. This does not excuse
attempts to resist transparency, but does help explain them. Though such
attacks have become rarer, there is now little presumption of good faith
between global warming believers and sceptics, even independent ones, as an
episode like this illustrates. Little wonder that the scientists are looking
tribal and jumpy, and that sceptics have leapt so eagerly on such tiny
scraps as proof of a conspiracy.***

Mida Saragih
Knowledge Management KIARA
mnovawanty@...

Sekretariat Nasional Koalisi Rakyat untuk Keadilan Perikanan (KIARA)
Jl. Tegal Parang Utara No. 43
Mampang, Jakarta 12790
Telp./Faks. +62(0)21 797 0482
Email. info@...
Website. www.kiara.or.id


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